What is good... SHAKESPEARE

"Most people remember suffering through Shakespeare plays in high school. I myself recall wondering why on earth we had to study yet another dead white guy. Aren't Dickens, Hemingway, and Hawthorne enough? How can anyone understand what the heck is going on anyway? Well, it took years for me to develop an appreciation, even a love for Shakespeare. I confess that a great part of that love came from having to teach Shakespeare. Yes, I was a high school English teacher, condemned to educate teenagers on why we have to read and understand these 400-year-old tragedies and comedies. In my effort to try to convince them, I had to first convince myself.

1.) The most important reason to study Shakespeare is because his plays provide windows into human nature. Though the costumes, the language, and the environments have changed, this is the one aspect of his plays that will always remain. People are the same today as they were then. In life, you will find the easily misled (Brutus), the vengeful (Iago, Hamlet, and others), the insecure and gullible (Othello), the overly ambitious (Macbeth and his wife), the lovers, the fighters, the innocent, and the villains. You can find the good, the bad, and the ugly - remember those witches? Any personality you can think of is represented somewhere, and by reading a Shakespearean play, you can understand those personalities better. Companies have been known to study Shakespearean plays to educate corporate executives on human nature.

2.) Focus on the DRAMA. My students often became lost in the language, but the real focus should be on the drama. These plays were some of the very first soap operas, filled with politics, family problems, insanity, murder, revenge, love, war, manipulations, the supernatural, humor, heartache, and the list goes on. These plays are popular for the same reasons that we enjoy television shows and movies today. The action is nonstop.

3.) Don't hate the language; learn to respect it. Shakespeare wrote most parts of his plays in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is a series of 5 sets of unstressed followed by stressed syllables.

ta - DA / ta -Da / ta - DA / ta - DA / ta - DA

Most lines in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets formed this rhythmic beat. This is not an easy thing to do. You should take a few minutes and try to formulate your own lines of iambic pentameter. If you can do that, you can at least develop an appreciation for the skill involved. Of course, the poetry can be overwhelming, but usually"

http://www.helium.com/items/99751-learning-to-appreciate-shakespeare